Improvised Technology And Weaponry

In Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (London, 1966), the spaceship that crash landed on Atlantis had earth-moving machinery and construction robots. Thus, the women colonists were able to built a walled city of paved streets and tall, concrete buildings with "Carolinian" domes (p. 135), although the machinery has worn out over the course of three hundred years.

A chemist in the crew constructed a parthenogenesis machine with which the planet has been populated but how long will that machine last? Fortunately, men arrive before it wears out. Anderson refers to "A few thousand women..." in the original crew (ibid.). I thought that the five hundred "families" of identical women meant that the crew had numbered just five hundred?

Lacking steam engine technology, the seafaring women have devised windmills, gears, shafts and propellers that enable their ships to sail into the wind. Lacking firearms and gunpowder ingredients, someone has devised an arbalest with a chamber that automatically feeds six iron-tipped quarrels into the slot while a tightly wound spring recocks the bow several times. "Big wooden flywheels..." work a "Primitive machine gun..." that fires "...a rain of darts..." (p. 137).

Davis Bertram drops his blaster when captured and later sees it used in war by the ruling Atlantean faction. He sets out to recover the gun but not to use it against defenseless women. I would want to retain the gun and to demonstrate its use but not to use it. Its effects, if used indiscriminately, would be like those of a nuclear attack, which I would certainly not launch, regarding it as an act of genocide, not of war.